Brain Lag, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Macro

The hardware macro that is.

First off, I know what you're thinking. Hardware macro = bad, right? Well, not quite.

Certainly, if you are using a hardware macro to press multiple keys, insert delays, or repeat key presses, that is definitely a no no. However, turning a single key press into a key press and release would be allowable, at least as far as I can tell. This is because for every physical key press, there is one key press in WoW. The only difference will be that rather than trying to do lightning fast hit & release movements, as soon as you press the key down, you've pressed and released. The reason that this is important is that the spellcast starts when you release the key, rather than press it. Also, it's very easy to test. Just hold a key down, and you can see you don't perform the action until it's released.

The next thing is to get a little mod called LagInfo. This is a very simple mod which will help you see how quickly you are casting your next spell. Getting this down to sub 100ms figures (or even sub 60ms) will help improve your DPS, especially for shaman.

For example, you'd expect 30 2 second lightning bolts to be cast in a 60 second window. In practise, you'll never see that figure. With a 100ms average "brain lag" you'd see 28.5, 200ms gives 27.3, and so on. Over longer fights this can really make a difference.

The "legality" of something like this comes down to whether Blizzard will make it a ban-able offence to have extra keypads with third party software that require macros to be set up for any mutli-key pressing (ie: Shift+1). A little bit of experimentation shows that a Press Shift, Press 1 macro works the same as a Press Shift, Press 1, Release Shift, Release 1 macro, at least when using my nostromo n52 (linked is the underlit n52te, but they're essentially the same product). This means that you cannot replicate the hold & release behaviour of a normal keyboard via the software for these peripherals (I am not sure how the Logitech G15 keyboard works in this respect).

Ironically, this all started because I couldn't figure out why my 4/1 rotation had Chain Lighting coming off cooldown earlier than I expected (ie: I'd just started the fourth bolt when it came up, rather than almost finishing the cast as I was expecting.), but after a few weeks of experimentation I was able to improve my DPS considerably. Hopefully something in this can help you improve yours too.